Intro (Slide 1): ################ Hello Everyone, I am one of the Tor Project's support team and in this short video I am going to speak about anonymity with Tor, how it works, what it does and does not provide. Slide 2: ######## - 1st/2nd/3rd bullets: Tor stands for The Onion Router, it was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others. - 4th/5th bullets: Now, The Tor Project, Inc. is a United States 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the research and development of tools for online anonymity and privacy since December 2006. Tor is an open-source project and available to everyone, we provide the software's source code and its design documents. We also provide a yearly financial report for the sake of transparency. Slide 3: ######## Tor is used by a 500,000 to 600,000 people (and that is only the directly connected uses) Slide 4: ######## - 1st bullet: Anonymity: Tor protects your anonymity on the internet by bouncing your traffic through a series of random computers so that no one can say who is talking to whom, how often, and how much data is sent (this is known as traffic analysis). - 2nd bullet: Privacy: Tor encrypts all your data so that no one can eavesdrop while it's traveling to its destination and because how of Tor works it provides privacy by design, meaning no relay operator can collect data on its users (unless the relay operator controls all a very large portion of the Tor network, but that is really hard to do). - 3rd bullet: Censorship circumvention: Because of how Tor works it also provides Censorship circumvention (bypassing filters). For example: if your internet service provider, work place or university filters/blocks some some websites then you can use Tor to bypass these restrictions. Slide 5: ######## To understand how Tor protects your privacy and anonymity on the internet I have to first explain how does a normal browser work.. Lets say you open your laptop then fire up a web browser (like Chrome, Firefox or Safari) then you visit example.com.. Your laptop will send an unencrypted request to your internet service provider to get example.com's homepage and because the request is unencrypted your ISP and anyone in between you and your ISP will know which websites you visited, when, how often and also your login credentials are at risk. When the request finally reaches example.com it will contain which page would you like to be delivered to you and your real IP which can be used to determine where are you on the map. As you can see this way of browsing the internet threatens your privacy and anonymity, lets how Tor tries to solve this problem.. Slide 6: ######## When you try to visit example.com through Tor the same process we discussed in the previous slide happens but with some extra steps.. First, you open the software that the Tor Project provides (the Tor Browser Bundle, which will be discussed in another video) and request example.com through it, Tor Browser will encrypt your request then send it to your ISP (which now, will not know the contents of your request) then your ISP will forward your request to the Entry relay (aka the Guard relay), which will also also encrypt your request for a second time and send it to the middle relay which again will encrypt your request for third time and forwards it to the exit relay. The exit relay is the final relay in the Tor network and its IP address will be the IP address example.com sees you as and finally your request is fully decrypted and sent to example.com. But ass you can see, you gain a lot of protection from Tor but it's not perfect and has limitations. Encryption can only be decrypted if the receiving computer can actually decrypt the data and because of that, your request is decrypted when it leaves the Tor network because example.com cannot understand Tor's encryption (because we have no control over example.com), which leads to the question, what if a bad exit node operator decides to look at your request/data? the answer and the only workaround is to use the HTTPS version of example.com, this is crucial to your privacy. Should I explain large scale surveillance (end to end timing attacks) ? Should I explain Man In The Middle attack ? Slide 7: ####### If you would like to really get the most out of Tor and use it effectively: - Use the Tor Browser bundle, our developers made custom Browser Bundle that contains everything you need to have a working, easy to use browser which routes all its traffic to the Tor network to protect your anonymity and privacy. - Use HTTPS versions of any website to avoid bad exit nodes that might try to read your data. - Please, do not install and addons (such as Flash/Java) or any browser extensions or modify the bundle in anyway; because that can lead to unexpected privacy leaks that can harm your anonymity greatly. - Do not open any documents while being online (especially DOC and PDF files) because these documents can contain Internet resources that will be downloaded outside of Tor by the application that opens them. This will reveal your non-Tor IP address, which is a risk to your anonymity. Slide 8: ####### The Tor network consists of 4000-4500 relays. You might ask the question: Who runs the Tor network? And the answer is simple: No one really runs the Tor network, not a single entity nor a single individual but everyone who contributes bandwidth. Slide 9: ####### If you would like to help the Tor network consider: - Donating money to the Tor Project to help the developers keep working on Tor. - Run a relay, a bridge or an exit node to help the network grow more in terms of speed and diversity. - If you are a developer and would like to help solving some of Tor's bugs or even have better ideas visit our volunteer page, pick a project, speak to the maintainer and start coding! - If you can't run a relay or a bridge or help developing Tor you can help us improve the documentation and translations so that using and understanding Tor becomes easier for everyone. - or you can create a video like this one and explain Tor, design a t-shirt about Tor, create a poster or a new icon. Slide 10: ######## If you have any questions about Tor, please contact us at help@rt.torproject.org Thanks you for watching.